and the university of nottingham

Monthly Archives: November 2010

Building on previous work (hyperventilation), we recently did an event at Thorpe Park’s Saw Alive Horror maze, a place we’re no strangers to – having worked there several times on previous projects. This time we equipped participants in our custom-made respiration-monitor gasmasks, gave them an infra-red camera and sent them into the maze. Their companions got to watch their experience from the comfort of the green room, haring lot of screams and seeing a blair-witch-esque view of events from the cameras. As with the previous hyperventilation event, respiration graphs were shown over the camera views. The event was really good fun and I will take with me for ever the image of the actors in the green room (all dressed up in suitably terrifying garb and makeup) warming up by standing in a circle singing a Britney Spears song!

This Halloween, I’ve been involved in a performance called Hyperventilation at the Mayhem Horror Film Festival at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham. Four members of a cinema audience were fitted with our custom made respiration-monitoring gas masks while watching the “terrifying” movie Piranha3D. Face pointing cameras and graphs of their respiration were projected live into the broadway’s bar during the performance, along with some highly entertaining commentary from Dr Brendan Dare (Brendan Walker). On the night I was stoating around dressed as an evil orderly with a massive (fake) bruise on my face. Beforehand I’d been up to my eyeballs getting the wifi based video projection working. All in all it was a pretty cool event. Favourite quote of the evening: “Are you Artists?” – Hurrah for science masquerading as art!

We had an interview from the guardian for their science podcast on the night: